


your body told me in a dream

by ifshesnotgone



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, already not canon compliant w/ Harrow the Ninth prologue, because i took 1 look at all the unknown worldbuilding elements and chickened out, definitely spoilers for Gideon the Ninth, not explicit yet but i promise the goths will eventually fuck
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2020-12-24 14:49:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21101249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ifshesnotgone/pseuds/ifshesnotgone
Summary: It is nothing that Harrow would dream of Gideon, but she still marks it as phenomenon, the way that she checks her pupils every morning to see if they have changed. In case, in case. Like counting doors. In case this information will prove useful.





	1. Chapter 1

Harrow has a dream. 

She is in a tunnel, which she can tell is under the earth from the cottony pressure in her head. There are no lights. Though Harrow’s eyes are adjusted to the dark, she cannot see any change in the landscape in any direction. There is the burnt smell of bone dust, which smells like home, like the Ninth, but so far as she can tell, no bones. This is the only thing she finds disconcerting. She thinks of things she could make out of dust alone. A number of small sharp projectiles. A single metacarpal, from which she could make a hand, from which she could make an arm, and then a skeleton, from which she could make more. Stretching what she has thinner and thinner. That’s how it was on the Ninth, where there was so little of anything— bones excepted— but always just enough to stretch. 

This comforts her. 

The dark comforts her. The complete aloneness of the tunnel comforts her. The feeling of tons of dirt and stone packed over her head comforts her. Harrowhark Nonagesimus has been short on comforts. For a while. 

Because it seems more sensible to go forward than back, she walks. Her feet make the sound of someone alone in the dark. She wonders where Ianthe is, and the other lyctors. She wonders where the other necromancers are, and their cavaliers. She wonders where Gideon is, and because she is dreaming, this doesn’t hurt. 

There is just Harrow, and an unmeasurable quantity, a fuckload, of darkness, and going forward. 

“Hey,” someone says, right next to her left ear, and Harrow turns around so hard she wakes up. 

__________________________

“Stance,” Ephigenia says, in a harsh voice, and Harrow assumes she is talking to Ianthe, because Ianthe, who enjoys all this too much, is usually the fuck up. Ephigenia is the lyctor tasked with the combat part of their training. She is a broad-shouldered, cool-eyed woman from the Fourth, who speaks so reasonably it is nearly possible to forget there is someone dying inside her at all times. Harrow imagines cutting off her hands and making prayer beads from her knuckles once a week, conservatively, and, the Emperor’s occasional presence on ship excluded, she is probably the most tolerable person aboard. 

Harrow is dueling a skeleton for the fifth time that morning, and soaked in such an absurd excess of sweat that she can feel her shirt unstick and restick to her back every time she moves. She thinks she prefers sweating blood. Her face paint runs down her neck in ashy streaks. Harrow’s robes do not tolerate this kind of exertion, and she feels naked without them, stripped down in a black shirt and leggings. Ianthe’s milky fish eyes are often on her during these sessions, despite Harrow’s repeated offers to poke them out. 

The skeleton in front of Harrow has a programmed series of attacks, which it deploys randomly, and a few basic defenses, which it deploys on the prompts of Harrow’s movement. It is a pitifully simple construction, a child’s toy made of toothpicks, and Harrow _itches _to get her nails into the little knot of thanergy that moves it and just unravel. Because she could, because she is insulted, because there is such a dearth of death on this ship full of lyctors and bones and at least this is something she can break. 

Of course, that’s not the point of the exercise. The point is inherited muscle memory, Griddle’s, and the practice of submitting to it. Telling Gideon’s dead instincts apart from her own adrenaline frazzled combat responses. To teach her to think and fight like a cavalier. “Isn’t the whole purpose of this,” Harrow had said, on the first day of this training, gesturing to her loathsome two-souled body, “that I don’t _have _to?”

“She makes a good point,” Ianthe had said, irritably, tipping her white golden head a little to the side, contemplating her rapier as one might contemplate a hair found in their otherwise very pleasant meal. 

On general principle, Harrow responded, “Choke on cremains and die.” 

Ephigenia handed them both swords and said, not at all unpleasantly, “Get up and fight, or I’ll have them beat you both sitting.” 

It is a question Harrow would still like an answer to, though she knows she won’t get one. It is such a sour and pointless waste of her time. She could have done dueling exercises without Gideon Nav’s soul burning insider her, dying vividly, forever. 

She is becoming good with the sword, at least. Or rather, she quite thinks she is, but, “Stance!” Ephigenia snaps again, at the same time that Harrow’s skeleton catches her side with a move that would have cut a deep slice into her using a proper blade. “You’re doing it again, Nonagesimus. Parry, don’t block.”

Ephigenia says this last plainly, in a voice that could be mistaken for kindness if Harrow had any use or interest for kindness. _It _meaning fighting as if with the longsword her muscles can’t hold yet. _It _meaning letting her body work without her presence, and thus make potentially deadly mistakes. _It _meaning even Griddle’s muscle memory cannot do the simplest shit right. 

_Fuck you, _Harrow thinks, clenching up her jaw in the way she has been warned to stop breathing, and parries, not blocks. She tried never to watch Griddle train, ever, and yet can imagine her very clearly dancing back and forth with Aiglamene, or whatever opponent she could find, a ridiculous imp with her hair headache red in the watery light. It was stupid, useless. It made Gideon laugh. _Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. _Harrow brings her sword into a clatter of rib bones. A heavier weapon would’ve dismantled them. The rapier is less satisfying. Harrow wants something to break. 

The truth is that Harrowhark is used to living in the ongoing rawness of a scream. This makes sense to her, this severed pain that does not end. She still gets up in the mornings, and goes to sleep some nights. She still makes her body attend to its fundamental tasks. Twice more, she beats the skeleton, indulging in the fantasy that she is incapable of necromancy she had mastered at four. At the end of the session, she tests herself against Ianthe, who shines with exertion and some eagerness. There is something about Harrow she has landed on as interesting. Harrow preferred horrible little Ninth goblin. “You’re getting better,” Ianthe says pleasantly, the metal slide of sword against sword, and Harrow thinks, _My cavalier kicked your cavalier’s ass, _and then endeavors to win the match without once making eye contact.

She is panting for breath when they break for lunch, little wisps of her hair sweat plastered to her forehead. She reeks, and is more aware of her own body than she has ever liked to be. How did Griddle not stink all the time? Harrow wouldn’t’ve credited her with regular shows. 

She smelled like warm cloth, and salt, and the close presence of another body. 

The best thing Harrow could do would be to never think about Gideon again. To put her behind a door that doesn’t open. _I pray the tomb is shut forever. I pray the rock is never rolled away. _What would she be left with, though? What part of her brain isn’t shining with Gideon’s greasy fingerprints, like one of her filthy magazines? Do you like that metaphor, Griddle, it’s for you? 

__________________________

Harrow has a dream where she is standing on a grey dusty floor of the Ninth. The muscles of her arms are straining. She is holding a sword that is a little outsized for her. A long, broad blade that she keeps having to readjust to the weight of. In front of her there is yet another skeleton, and Harrow thinks that all soldiers must be excessively patient or excessively stupid, because even the dullest necromantic training had more variance than this.

This skeleton is excessively battered, missing three or four ribs and its lower jaw. It is still able to hold a blade of its own, but only barely and not very well. Harrow finds this more than a little insulting, both to a general principle of craftsmanship and her specific abilities with the sword. She reaches, reflexively, to make the skeleton whole where it is wrong, regrowing ribs and jaw and forming the small, perfect pearls of teeth. It should not be even a twinge of effort. 

The flat of a blade smacks her in the side of the head. It sends Harrow down, hard, onto her knees. Her head moans a low ache and for a moment she flickers on the wavering edge of unconsciousness. Harrow braces herself up with a hand in the dirt, trying to get upright, at the same time that Aiglamene snaps, “If you drop that blade, Nav, don’t expect to pick it back up.” 

_Oh, _Harrow thinks as her body struggles back to its feet and lifts its sword again. _Oh that is wildly unpleasant. _She glances briefly down at her hands around the blade, which are brown and calloused. She was so golden for a planet with so little sun. It makes sense, the perverse kind of sense that is familiar to Harrow, that she would dream this. This one of twoness in Griddle’s body, where Harrow’s arms move without her having to tell them to, and beat and beat against the blade in her opponent’s hand. Here is how she trained to make the reflexes you will have for the rest of your life. Think about that. 

“You’ve done this before, Nav,” Aiglamene is saying. As Harrow turns in the process of blocking the skeleton— Block don’t parry, parry don’t block. If she could Harrow would feed Griddle her own ears for branding two fighting styles onto her reflexes when Harrow has never been taught shit about _either— _she sees the instructor leaned impatiently against the wall of the training room. “Did that last session brain injure you? Because I’m not sure you can afford it.” 

Harrow bristles. This tone in the voice of a woman who always spoke to her with respect. But of course, the tone is not for her, and Harrow’s body, or rather the body that is Harrow’s at the moment, does not bristle. She hefts her sword with that renewed, thrilling strain in her muscles and throws herself at her opponent. Aiglamene’s face, when Harrow can catch it, is stony and cragged with scars, as it always was. Harrow decides to put the jagged catch of relief in her throat down to Griddle’s body and not herself. 

It is a surreal experience, lying curled in a body that moves without her, that forces the feedback of its nerves and its chemical swells up through her mind. 

It isn’t terrible, though. It doesn’t hurt, except when Gideon’s body hurts. When the dull sword the skeleton is holding takes her in the cheek again, and she spits a red stained tooth out onto the dusty floor, and then keeps swinging, laughing raw through the hole in her mouth. She’s gotten into the groove of it, she’s moving very well. Though, Harrow qualifies quickly, stamping on this thing that feels very close to pride, Griddle’s opponent is dead, barely competent, and holding a dull blade. 

Harrow does a little internal math. Gideon’s body is undersized. She’s struggling with the weight of the sword. How old was she when Aiglamene started training her? Maybe eight, maybe nine. There was a window of time in which she had a short, dull practice blade that she carried around all the time and prized with an attention disturbingly similar to how she would later prize her stolen pornography. Harrow knows this because she made a regular practice of stealing it. Losing that blade enraged Gideon so predictably and so completely that it was like having a hand clenched in her nerve endings. Harrow went again and again to the well of that outrage. And Gideon would, inevitably, hit her, because Griddle thought with her fists. And Harrow would, inevitably, tell her father or her mother and arrange for punishment. 

Now she wonders why poor idiot Griddle didn’t just ask Aiglamene for another blade. If there was thing that was in sufficient quantity on the Ninth at that time, it was supplies for children. Griddle and her could have run through every practice blade in the armory, and it would have made no difference to anyone. Harrow wonders why she always rose to the dangled bate. 

Beside the point, though. This isn’t that blade. The weight suggests very much that Gideon is training with a real sword, if one sized smaller than the two hander she was married to, which is tucked securely under Harrow’s bunk but don’t think about that now this doesn’t need to be a nightmare yet. Eleven, Harrow guesses, twelve. The tooth by Griddle’s heavy booted foot is a child’s. If Harrow could, she would lean down and pick it up. She could pocket it, keep a piece of Gideon clutched to her. This, here, this is mine. 

Irrelevant, since her arms are busy for her._ Is this what it’s like for you, Nav? _Harrow thinks, indistinct over the clatter of blades. Because this is not so bad. This is not the worst it could be. If this is what it was like for Gideon, it would not be so bad. 

There is a clatter, and Harrow discovers, unexpectedly, that she has disarmed her opponent. The skeleton’s blade is on the ground. “There you are,” Aiglamene says, with some meager approval, and a giddy, unbelievable joy races up Harrow’s— Gideon’s— ringing body. “Do it again.”

Griddle whoops, repositions her feet. Every bone she has aches, but she can barely keep still. There is the rush of her adrenaline, there is the flush in her cheeks, there is her grating laughter as she blocks a blow. _Oh, _Harrow thinks, in the part of this experience that is exclusively hers. _This made her so happy. _It cuts through her with rage, or something like rage. That feeling she spent most of her adolescence throwing Gideon against the sharp edges of. 

_Nav, _Harrow hisses, against the fragile round shell of her own skull. And then, in the horrible radiance of this body’s joy, _Griddle. _And then, trying on that tone that she never got to get used to using, that tone that grants some meager space, _Gideon. _

And finally, in a small mental voice that she would bundle in a sack and drown if she could, _Are you in here? _

“Just because it’s heavier doesn’t make it a club, Nav,” Aiglamene calls, and Harrow’s imaginary Gideon self corrects.

“Anything’s a club if you use it like one,” she says, because she will answer Aiglamene, apparently, but not Harrow. Which makes some kind of sense. 

Sometime later, Harrow wakes alone.

__________________________

Harrow has been having these dreams since it happened. 

No, there is a great deal of implied untruth in that statement. Harrow has had vivid dreams for most of her life. There is an unpleasant staple where her mother walks in to find Harrow painting the face of her corpse, and Harrow’s living mother stares at Harrows dead mother for some time, and then begins to offer cool criticism of Harrow’s work. Which is, admittedly, very bad. The flesh around the ribs sometimes drops pieces. There is another, recurring, where Harrow is attempting to lead prayers and she begins spitting up children’s teeth, which clatter out of her mouth like gems and mounting evidence. Almost equally unpleasant is the dream she has had since she was fourteen, where she stands naked before Gideon who of course has always been a character in her dreams, and Gideon counts her bones. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, lightly touching the skin over each bone with the calloused pad of her finger until she has numbered all 206 of them. _All there, _she says, and smiles the quick smile that shows an uneven flash of her teeth. _Nothing missing. _

So it is nothing that Harrow would dream of Gideon, but she still marks it as phenomenon, the way that she checks her pupils every morning to see if they have changed. In case, in case. Like counting doors. In case this information will prove useful. If this was even the first time Harrow had dreamed of riding along in Gideon’s body, it might have been remarkable, but she has been trying to dismiss that idea from her subconscious since the first trial and the clattering idiot exhilaration of Gideon’s mind mid-battle. She dreamed that dream a good while before it could be viable evidence of anything. 

She still takes notation of every dream she has now. At least, every dream that Gideon makes a cameo in, which is most of them, on a sheet of flimsy which she would rather be choked with than have anyone else— especially Griddle, for that matter— ever see. What happens in them, whether she knows she is dreaming or not in the moment, how she wakes. How can Harrow not take note of every absent minded twitch, every subconscious image, every thought that seems to rise unbidden? In case this information will prove useful. 

There is a library on the Emperor’s ship grander than the Ninth’s. Likely even grander than the Sixth’s, and Harrow spends the few free hours she has in it, exhuming every scrap of information. Books on resurrection, on contacting souls, on trapping spirits. There is more poetry on the necromancer-cavalier relationship than there is scientific data, but she reads the poetry as well. 

There is not a single book on lyctors. Yes, the emperor’s eight are mentioned time to time in histories, though rarely by name, as they were in many books on the Ninth. No volumes, though, on the particular capabilities of the lyctors. No training manuals, no scientific texts, no personal histories. On a ship filled with lyctors, not one book describes how to make a lyctor, how to train a lyctor, how to kill one. Not one poem pays tribute to their exploits and their trials. 

Harrow finds this, needless to say, to be unlikely.

She is rarely alone in the library. There is, predictably, the wan lyctor from the sixth, a girl with waist length hair and an air of smug disinterest, who appears, and is most decidedly not, nineteen, and, less so, the horribly affable lyctor of the second, who is a contradiction in so many ways that do not interest Harrow at all. The sixth, whose name is Ismene, holds forth on her own very long life at meals so frequently and to such an extent that Harrow, who has mostly tried to maintain propriety, or at least silence, towards her elders until she knows better what to expect from them, felt compelled to ask, “Have you told this story so rarely that you imagine anyone might find it interesting?” Harrow does not believe for a second that these people lack the ego or the time to keep records. 

No one here will address the subject of Cytherea. Ianthe, on the drug of her new power or new attention, asks all kinds of nasty, stupid questions. Harrow thought she was cannier than that. Now she is smug and overfull of things she thinks she can get away with. To Harrow’s enormous irritation, she even sometimes gets answers. On Cytherea, though, she is met with silence or a bored subject change. Only the Emperor will say anything at all, and what the Emperor says, with a tender weariness is, _It was very sad. _

“Is this all there is?” Harrow asks Ismene, when one day she rounds the corner of her outrage with the library’s insufficiency. She is not so much expecting a useful answer as she wants someone to hear that she is displeased. There are other, smaller things she misses Griddle for. 

Ismene is lounging on one of the sofas in the library with an air of relaxation that makes Harrow want to slap her. She has made a point of not raising her head from her book, although she has doubtlessly heard Harrow’s boots and their less than silent approach. Now, she lifts a languid eyebrow, and repeats, “This?” as if Harrow might be making a philosophical inquiry. 

“This,” Harrow makes a short, contained gesture to the library. Which holds, conservatively, enough books to fill most of a millennia. 

“Is this,” Ismene repeats, “not enough for you?” 

That is not an answer. Harrow waits. Nothing further is forthcoming. Perhaps she became too used to the weight of the Ninth’s reputation, which carries no weight at all here. 

“No,” Harrow says finally, and, in a sneer she has practiced since infancy, “Is it enough for you?”

The lyctor licks her lips. “I have what I need,” she says. 

Of the eight original lyctors, three are still living. Ismene, from the Sixth. The Second, Cyrus. Ephigenia, from the Fourth. With Harrow and Ianthe, there are five of them. In moments of particular irritation, Harrow imagines an individual and violent death for each. Maybe she will strangle Ismene with that irrationally long hair. 

It doesn’t matter. Harrow is used to doing things herself. 

Harrow reads books on beguiling corpses, on the animation of skeletons, on the absolute teeth grinding basics of necromancy she has practiced her entire life, in the hopes of finding something she has missed. 

Harrow wonders if a soul trapped in the moment of dying is aware that is dying forever. Dying forever in the present tense. She wonders if it is aware at all. She wonders if a soul like that is always inside the moment of pain just before the pain ceases, if it is always feeling the lights go out, if it is always pronouncing the last consonant of _Ninth._

__________________________

Harrow has a dream in which she wakes. Lying flat on her back on a soft bed. The walls around her are made of stone. The light through the window is dim and electric. There is the smell of home in the walls, bonemeal and damp. Harrow turns her head to the side, her cheek against the pillow, which is smeared with a black streak of her facepaint. She falls asleep with it on as many nights as not.

Seated on the other side of the bed, there is Gideon Nav with her shirt off. 

_Don’t move, _Harrow thinks, with a prey animal’s frozen logic. Her muscles are knotted up, her breath hot and dry across her tongue. Gideon’s back is to her. Gideon’s back is broad and brown in the half light of the Ninth, and when she shifts a muscle flexes fluidly under her skin. Gideon’s hair is shorn close at the back of her neck, and mussed. Harrow tries to shut her eyes, and opens them again. She is naked under the sheets, and Gideon is naked, and Harrow’s mouth is coppery, as if filled with blood. 

Gideon stretches, in a long arc of self-congratulatory motion that involves knotting her hands over her head, and brings every muscle out between her shoulder blades. Harrow hates her for this, violently. She hates Griddle more for this smug motion than she hates Ianthe, than she ever hated the Sixth, or the Second, or the Eighth. 

All at once, Gideon twists, and does something clumsy and very fast with her whole body, that rattles the entire bed and puts her nose so close to Harrow’s nose that her breath moistens Harrow’s mouth. 

Like the ringing in a blown eardrum, Harrow can feel the ghost of Gideon’s mouth on the bridge of her nose. Awful, awful, awful, that small confessional intimacy where it was not supposed to go, which was so conceptually large that Harrow failed to keep the specifics. Were Gideon’s lips chapped? Probably. At home, they usually were. 

“You have like, literal resting bitch face right now,” Gideon says. Harrow says nothing. Gideon’s eyes are thready with gold and she is looking at a point slightly over Harrow’s left shoulder, shifty. 

“Like you’re a bitch,” Gideon elaborates, making another effort, which implies that she thought Harrow’s comprehension was the problem the first time, “and you’re resting.” 

Harrow can feel every muscle in her throat move as she swallows. “Has it ever occurred to you,” she says, with only a mild roughness to her voice, “not to speak?” 

Gideon smiles. She smiles like she is happy to hear Harrow’s voice. Her lips are chapped and her smile cracks them open a little. “I tried that for a while,” she says, “remember?” 

“Not long enough.”

“Come on,” Gideon says, and props herself up on an elbow. She is leaning over Harrow. She could put her hand down on the other side of Harrow’s head, and be on top of her. There is the broadness of her chest, the slight ridge of her collarbone. “You talk a lotta shit for someone in bed with the Ninth’s premium hottie.” 

There are certain things for which the only possible answer is outraged spluttering. After a moment, though, Harrow finds another one. “When you speak, Nav,” she says, and familiar irritation loosens, a little, the coiled ache of her shoulders, “the collective intelligence of the entire solar system plummets.” 

Gideon leans down and kisses her. 

Her lips are warm. Dry and tentative. She doesn’t open her mouth much. There is a pain in Harrow’s back like a clenched talon, and it is horrible, but Gideon starts to move away, and that is horrible, so Harrow kisses her back. Gideon lets out a little huff of breath, almost a grunt, and then slides her hand against Harrow’s cheek. It comes to rest on her jaw, her fingers sliding into Harrow’s hair, and Harrow thinks how _big _Griddle’s hands are, like this is a stunning revelation, because Gideon really, truly has managed to lower her intelligence quite a bit. Gideon tilts her head, searching for some angle, and her mouth opens just a bit against Harrow’s. Harrow can taste her, which is disgusting, objectively, as that is another person’s spit in her mouth, and then tentatively, there is Gideon’s tongue, the warm tip of it, brief against Harrow’s lip.

Irritably, Harrow wonders how she is supposed to tell whether Gideon is good at this. Then, with no small horror, she wonders how she is supposed to tell whether_ she_ is good at this. Gideon’s thumb drags on her jaw in a small, firm circle, and Harrow can feel her touch all the way down to the bone. When Gideon’s mouth leaves hers, Gideon lets out a breath that shakes like she has been holding it the whole time. 

Want claps in Harrow that could split her open, and she stops Gideon pulling away any further with an insistent hand on the back of her head. That short, shorn hair like an animal’s between her fingers. Harrow pulls Gideon’s mouth back to hers, open, and tries, with sheer insistence, to push this feeling into Gideon, because Gideon has to feel this way too, Harrow refuses to be out on this ledge alone. She feels naked, and she is naked, that is her body knotted up under her, that is her body betraying her by trembling, that is her body which Gideon could look at any time she wanted. Gideon’s thumb moves endlessly on her jaw, which is maybe a gentling motion, useless, but feels almost frantic, like she is trying to wear her way down to Harrow’s skeleton and touch her there, put her hands all over that. When Harrow catches Gideon’s lip between her teeth, she bites, and Gideon makes that noise again, like something has hit her very hard in the chest. 

Harrow feels feral. She wants to eat Gideon’s mouth. She wants to climb inside of it. She wants to disappear her body and all its raw awful nerves so that she can push Gideon down and demand that stupid, stunned sound out of her for the rest of time. Gideon should never be allowed to do anything else but make that sound again. 

When Gideon pulls away, Harrow’s frustration voices itself unbidden, a sound strangled somewhere between a snarl and a whine.

Gideon’s free hand comes to rest on her cheek, cupping her face. She’s laughing, a low, rough laugh, and it makes Harrow want to reach into her chest and crack her ribs open. But Gideon just holds her face, steady, until Harrow looks up at her. Her eyes are hazy and her mouth is swollen, red where Harrow has bitten her and bitten her. “Um,” she says, and then, “fuck.” She takes one hand away from Harrow’s face to wipe her mouth. Harrow isn’t sure why this makes her indignant. 

Gideon swallows twice, and Harrow thinks,_ Don’t you dare say anything, Griddle. Don’t you dare._ But Gideon says, “You’re shaking,” which is the worst thing she could have. 

“No.” Harrow tries to lock her muscles again. This doesn’t help. Gideon can’t meet her eyes, keeps glancing down away from them, and then off to the side, away from Harrow’s body, and then back up again. Harrow controls an urge to yank her hair. 

Gideon takes her hand. Her thumb strokes over Harrow’s wrist, where the blue veins show. Gideon has never been near her naked body when she was in a position to look at her. The immediate aftermath of the siphoning hardly counts. She wants to cover Gideon’s eyes, or, possibly, put them out with her thumbs. There is a crease between Gideon’s eyebrows, like she’s puzzled, or concentrating very hard. She brings Harrow’s hand to her stomach, which is muscle hardened, and moves with her breathing. Harrow clenches her jaw. She has a sense that flinching away would be letting Gideon win, and she slides her fingers over Gideon’s body. The skin is soft there, and when Gideon shivers, Harrow feels it as a rolling of the earth under her hand. 

“Hey,” Gideon says, with some urgency. Harrow shuts her eyes. She presses the heel of her hand into Gideon’s flexing muscle, and then her fingers slide over the puckered edge of a hole between two ribs. 

“What—“ Harrow begins, but she knows. She passes her hand over Gideon’s stomach, up her chest. She is trying to clinical about it, turning out as many switches as she can in her mind. There is a wound and there is a wound and there is a wound. Here it would have pierced her stomach, her left lung, here it would have splintered her spine.

Gideon allows her. Gideon cannot do anything else. 

Harrow pushes lightly on her shoulders with both hands, and the corpse goes, and lies flat on the bed, displaying the five ragged wounds to the empty air. They are hurt and black as open eyes. _I should have stitched them up_, Harrow thinks, numbly, _I would have stitched them up. _

The corpse turns its head to her, opens its mouth. 

Harrow wakes. 

She rolls out of bed and scrambles to the bathroom, barely gets her head over the toilet bowl before she is spitting up bile and nothing. There isn’t any food in her stomach, she’s spent her last four mealtimes in the library, but her organs fist endlessly around the emptiness, trying to get up what isn’t there, trying to force something _out._ Harrow’s arms won’t stop shaking. Her hair hangs dank and sweat soaked in front of her eyes. She needs to cut it again. The fact that it still grows, that any part of her still grows. Harrow thinks of the opening in Gideon’s chest. She thinks of Gideon’s big hand on the side of her cheek. She loses some time to dry heaving. 

She couldn’t have done it, Harrow tells herself. She wouldn’t, but it is more important that she couldn’t. The most advanced necromancy in the world could not have made Griddle say those things. Harrow could not have made her mouth hot and damp. She could not have made her move in ways that were surprising. Harrow could not have made her warm. This is not how a puppeted corpse behaves. Harrow has experience to speak from. 

Harrow lies down on the floor to catch her breath, curled around the base of the toilet, holding her head between her hands. She presses the heels of her palms into the sides of her skull. _Couldn’t happen_, she tells herself, _couldn’t happen, _trying to beat the rationality into her mind. She wants to press her head smaller and smaller. She wants to fracture her skull. Maybe that would kill a lyctor, a sudden and direct blow to the head. 

_I refuse this, _Harrow tells her own pitted, rotting mind, as if it has ever listened. _This is not allowed. _

Then, she writes it all down. She does what she can do. She gets back to work. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW in this chapter for self harm. In a fantasy/lyctor-y context, but could still be triggering.

Harrow elects not to sleep for a while. 

There are a number of reasons for this, and the primary is practical. The Emperor’s army of five cannot afford waste. Harrow and Ianthe are playing catch-up on training that might have taken several lifetimes on a negative time frame. Every day spent is a day overspent, a day too late, a day their talents could be utilized somewhere they are needed. _I had hoped there would be eight, _the Emperor said, surveying his two ascendant servants on the first day they knelt before him, with their swords and their robes and their losses. There can be no more just yet, though. This is understood. What would the Emperor say to the houses? _I have taken your children and my steward has slaughtered them. _It wouldn’t do. He had hoped there would be eight. The face of God was the face of a man often disappointed. There were two, and they would have to be enough. 

All this to say that Harrow and Ianthe’s recreational time is not a priority. They are expected to rise early, eat quickly. They train their bodies through the morning. There is an hour for lunch, sometimes less. They train their necromancy through the evening, with their three elder lyctors alternating for specialized lessons. The nights are short. They are recommended texts to study for the few hours that are their own. Sleep eats what little time Harrow has. And she is not willing to sacrifice her side project to the needs of her body. 

The second reason is that: the needs of her body. Lyctorhood is full of new rules, new sensations. Harrowhark as Reverend Daughter, as once-nun, knew what she could deny herself and still meet her obligations. Deny herself in the name of meeting obligations. How many forgotten meals. How many nights spent poring over the Ninth’s books, or practicing the narrow slopes of her mother’s signature. She wants to know the rules now. Keeping her body alive and obedient is a matter of allocated energy, and she is never out of energy, so it is only a matter of how much she can allocate at once. What is stretching herself too thin? Better to know that now, in the contained environment of this ship, than to have to learn it later. 

Two legitimate reasons is enough to outweigh the embarrassment of the third. That Harrowhark, like a child, fears nightmares. And so she turns her back on her subconscious, a little sullenly, and refuses to speak to it for a while. 

She still goes to meals. It would be suspicious not to. In the middle of the night, she goes to the library. She takes out books. She returns them before morning. She has become almost certain that there is a gap here, and it feels like an intentional one. In the absence of what is there, she tries to read for what is not.

_I know you became a lyctor under duress,_ the Emperor told her, _You aren’t the first. _At the time, Harrow thought this meant sympathy, meant pity, but now in her bedroom, bent over a hundred stories of necromancers and cavaliers, who never became lyctors, but died. Foolishly or romantically or happily in the intervening centuries where _one flesh, one end_, was a metaphor, she realizes what else it means. Vows of eternal devotion and bad poetry and brave cavaliers falling on swords. Do you hear that, Griddle? You’re not even original. It means someone must have tried before. _You aren’t the first. _Someone must have tried before. 

__________________________

In the bright hours of the early morning, when the ship’s lights come on outside her quarters, to mark the arbitrary beginning of a hypothetical day, Harrow does push-ups and sit-ups on the floor beside her bed. Counting upwards in the silence of her room, listening to her own voice thin with exertion. Her number keeps going up, though. This is her fourth day without sleep. Sometimes she pulls the flimsy from its hiding place, tucked into a tear of her mattress, and reads her own accounts of her dreams. It’s in every way an efficiency, and in most ways a relief, not to waste her time sleeping out of sheer habit. But part of her misses this habit of record-keeping, which felt like a kind of progress even if it wasn’t, the nightly activities of Gideon in her mind. 

She performs her morning prayers. Harrow met God, and he could not give her the one thing she wanted. Is it strange, then, that she still prays? 

Harrow dresses in her training clothes. She takes her rapier and goes to put Griddle’s muscle memory through its motions. When Harrow is mid-fight, there is at least something to indicate that Gideon changed her. Something physical. She wonders how much practice it will take before she begins to consider these motions her own, just as she wonders, in her worst moments, how many years it will be before she begins forgetting things— the weight of hands and the precision of facial expression and the exact words said here and here and here. It would be nicer to believe that she won’t ever, but Harrow has experience. She knows that life marches on, with or without her consent. 

In the gym, they stretch as Ephigenia tweaks the programming on the skeletons. New reactions, new challenges. The clothes that Ianthe practices in are a stone grey and simple. They wash her out less than the opulence she brought from the Third. Or Ianthe herself is less washed out, humming with the pale light of the power hungry recently fed. She buns her hair up tightly for these practices, possibly having to do with the time Harrow got her hand in it during a sparring match and pulled a clump out. When Ianthe had asked Ephigenia, a little petulantly, if this was a legal move, Ephigenia considered for a moment and finally said, “It worked didn’t it?”

Ianthe rises from the graceful bend of a runner’s stretch, and, slipping into her next, whispers, “Does yours still fight you?”

On instinct, Harrow begins to snap, her shoulders already up and her teeth already bared before it occurs to her that Ianthe is offering information she wants. “What?”

Ianthe gives her a smile the color of old milk. “Your cav,” she says, and then, after a moment of consideration, like she needs time to _remember. _“Gideon.” 

It is the first time Harrow has heard her name aloud since she boarded the ship. It strikes her like a murder, like an iron spike shoving up between her fifth and sixth ribs. _Give that back, _she wants to say to Ianthe, _that’s mine._ Like the concept of Gideon is a thing she owns or a thing that can be taken.

And didn’t Harrow spend all her life crouched jealously over Gideon? Like a cat, feral and starving, over a meal. Hissing her displeasure when anyone else came near, and when she tried escape, reaching to bat her out of the sky. There is a way, she thinks, that the state of her life now is perfectly symmetrical, perfectly sensible. Here is Gideon, trapped with her forever, but also gone beyond return.

“Babs still fights me,” Ianthe murmurs, yawning and arching her back until it cracks. “It’s the worst during these.” She motions at the training floor, at Ephigenia urging the skeletons to their starting places. “When I fight.” 

Harrow’s voice issues from a lightless place. It sounds like stones scraping together. “What does that feel like?”

Ianthe smiles a thin smile, and takes her time folding her body into a sitting position. She is visibly aware that she has Harrow’s attention, luxuriating. It would be satisfying, if ineffective, just to punch her.

“It feels,” Ianthe tucks her hand against her chin, considering. “Like when I was swallowing him. His—“ She pauses, searching out the word, her thin, chapped lips pursed. “Consciousness. Pushing against mine. Struggling. And I have to,” She makes a small motion with her hands, like someone pushing on the shoulders of a drowning victim. “Hold him down.” 

Harrow has no less contempt for Naberius Tern dead than she did alive. When her stomach turns, it’s not for him. “He wakes up?”

“Not wakes up,” Ianthe qualifies, “no. It’s more like— Someone dying in their sleep. Spasms. The mind is gone though. ” She sighs, with no regret at all, and says mildly, “Poor Babs.” And Harrow hates her, not for what she did but for how lightly she lives with it.

“Yours doesn’t?” 

Harrow ignores her. 

“Maybe it’s different for you." Ianthe shrugs, and lifts a hand to neaten away a strand of hair that has come loose from her bun. "Since Gideon killed herself.” Harrow stills, and then straightens herself up, into a sitting position. She rolls her shoulders back, and listens to the movement of the bones in her back. Ianthe makes a small, disinterested sound. “Alright.” 

Harrow slaps her. Or, rather, her hand is briefly in contact with Ianthe’s face before the rest of her body follows the motion of it and Harrow is on top of her.Of course she cannot do real harm, so instead she does what is satisfying, what seems like it might hurt. She strikes at Ianthe’s throat, her mouth, her eyes. Ianthe opens her mouth and the heel of Harrow's hand scrapes against her teeth. Harrow punches again with the intent of knocking them out. Make her swallow them and grow bones in the lining of her intestines. Ianthe’s hand shoves against her face, trying to push her off, and Harrow bites without thinking, tastes blood, bites again. Ianthe’s other hand is in her hair, tangled at the back of her neck and tearing. 

“Hey,” Ephigenia says, impatiently, and from across the room. “Quit it.” 

Harrow’s head aches, her jaw aches. Ianthe is kicking, trying to buck her off, silent as a dying fish, and Harrow gets in another jab at her throat before the small piece of Ianthe’s hand that is in her mouth begins to change and swell. Harrow tries to spit it out, but it is already an expanding knot of flesh, like a tumor, pushing against her teeth and back down her throat, cutting off her air supply. She gags, but she doesn’t stop hitting. _Okay, bitch, let’s go, _she thinks, in a mental voice that is a little like Griddle, but _not _Griddle, just a lifetime of Griddle patterned into her brain. The mass is pushing her jaws apart but even gagging on skin she wants to crush Ianthe’s wind pipe. She wants her spitting blood and gasping for breath and absolutely fucking speechless with the pain. The flesh is putting feelers out of her mouth, over her nostrils, trailing up, up, up to press against Harrow’s eyes like a pair of thumbs, but Harrow feels something _crush _and Ianthe keeps making a _hhh, hhh, hhh _sound like an animal dying.

Another hand tangles in her hair, and yanks her back. Harrow kicks, and snarls, as sharp fingers push into the skin of her neck. It’s one of the skeletons, scruffing her like a kitten. Harrow is so unused to bones not obeying her that this knocks her stunned for a minute, before she unravels the skeleton like a ball of thread and it drops her straight to the floor. 

“For fuck’s sake,” Ephigenia says. Harrow claws with one hand at the layer of skin thickening over her face like a callous, and directs the rest of her attention to drawing every bone in the room towards her, mashing them together into something blind and scuttling and hateful. 

Then someone else takes hold of all of them and _yanks. _In the same moment, Ephigenia smacks her, hard, on the back of the head. Harrow grunts. The smack doesn’t do much, but she stumbles, still trying to suck in breath where there’s no air, and drops her grasp on the bones. 

“Are you done?” Ephigenia’s voice is cool and pointed. There’s a pause, which is almost sullen, and then Harrow finds herself spitting up liquid flesh, gagging it onto the floor, wiping it away from her eyes. Ianthe, across from her, looks sour and disheveled, her hair hanging limply out of her bun. They are both breathing hard. There is a mess of bones at Harrow’s feet. 

Ephigenia looks between them, her lip curled in mild disgust. Harrow reflects the same expression back at her. “Well,” she murmurs indifferently, “You’ll have to practice with each other today, I guess.”

Ianthe spits a tooth onto the floor, and then smiles. She’s already regrown it, her mouth perfectly aligned and white. “You poor, nasty, flailing thing," she says.

Harrow goes and picks up her sword. 

__________________________

On the floor of the quarters, Harrow folds herself up, as if in prayer. 

She rests her forehead against the cool side of her bedframe, and rolls Griddle’s name out of her mouth. _Gideon, Gideon, Gideon. _Over and over. “Why aren’t you fighting?” Harrow asks her headache and the cold silence. “Why don’t you fight, Nav? Can’t you do that? Can you not fulfill the extraordinarily minimal expectation of being difficult?” 

Harrow clenches her hands around the bed frame until she feels the skin is about to tear. She thinks of what Ianthe said about Tern. Like someone dying in his sleep. She knocks her head against the mattress, and then again against the bed frame. “Gideon.” Harrow’s back hurts. Is this knot in her muscles exertion? She wishes that Gideon hated her more. In death, in life. Hated her enough to fight her now, to get between Harrow’s mind and its grip on her nervous system and push. Hated her enough to never have given her this thing she asked for and cannot live with. Hated her enough to refuse that first request, to make a final refusal after the other refusals, to say _I’d rather rot here than serve you anywhere. _And then Harrow would have gone to the Ninth with Ortus, or with Aiglamene, or with no one but her pride, and died there, likely even in shorter order. The Reverend Father and Mother of Drearburh would have never risen from their chambers again, and the Ninth House would fall to a few sepulchral nuns, and then to the mercy of the Emperor, and then to dust. Its duties someone else’s, its people decrepit or dead. Gideon would probably not have rotted there. In the decay and without Harrow’s particular spite, Gideon could have fled anywhere. Would be landing in the arms of the Second before Harrow’s body was even cold. 

You cannot repay a debt to the dead. Harrow sucks in a breath. “I am asking you to give me something to work with,” she says. The tension ringing in her back, in her jaw, in her temples. “Please.” 

You can never repay a debt to the dead. It doesn't matter what you do, your skill or intellect or how thickly you stitch yourself to your desperation. The dead are beyond benefit or care.

The first thing Harrowhark ever learned was how to make a bone stand up for her and obey. The second was that she would be a debt for the rest of her life.

Harrow’s puts her face into the soft flesh of the mattress, clenches her teeth in the sheet until she can feel individual threads grinding together, and screams for a very long time. 

Then she gets up, and punches the polished metal wall. “Fuck you,” Harrow snaps, and slams both hands into the panel as hard as she can. “Fuck you, you hateful, useless idiot.” Another punch. It makes not much difference to the metal or the dead, and very little to her flesh. Harrow’s new body is a fascination, which does not need food or rest, which feels pain but takes so long to make her answerable to it. Need, here, narrows to a fine black point, and can be sharpened. Harrow beats her fists against the wall until she feels something crumble in her hands, and does not stop. She wants to know if her body will let her break faster than she can heal. She sets herself to finding out. 

The pain is blinding, and then monotonous. Harrow watches a dent form in the metal, slowly, as she makes God’s ship answer to her also. Her whole body is a raw nerve. She spits froth and venom. “I hope you feel this,” she growls. “I hope this hurts you too.” 

When Harrow finally stops, after she does not know how long, her hands are wrecked On four of her fingers, broken bone has pierced through skin, comfortingly white against the raw mess of blood and tendon. It occurs to Harrow that the very fact of her consciousness speaks to a new bodily capability. She sinks down on her floor, her back against the wall, hears, with minimal interest, her breath hitching and sobbing, and enters the pain of healing. 

It’s a long process, which hurts nearly as badly as the break, bones straightening one by one as Harrow bites the collar of her shirt and fails not to scream. In the void between fixing her third and fourth finger, Harrow’s vision grays out. She drifts just a moment, halfway to unconsciousness, surprised by her own exhaustion. How heavy her bones feel, her head, each muscle and organ tucked inside her body. 

“Your brain right now,” says Gideon, right behind Harrow and so close to her left ear Harrow can feel her breath, “is straight up like… three pissed off vultures fighting. And they’re all on fire.”

And Harrow startles awake, sputtering, offended, and still alone.

“Nav,” she mutters, into the heel of her mended hand, and then she makes the last break whole. 

Harrow allows herself to skip her pushups that morning, on the premise that the night’s activities have already exercised her arms enough. 

__________________________

In practice that day, Ianthe does not speak to Harrow at all. It is a blessed relief. Everything goes very smoothly in the silence, with only Ephigenia’s barking voice occasionally interrupting. There are moments where she sounds a little like Aiglamene, but only if Harrow tries hard not to hear her very well.

At lunch, she seats herself next to Ismene, who has a small old book open beside her, her hands occasionally setting utensils down to turn a page. 

“We’re allowed to take those?” Harrow is trying to get a look at the text over Ismene’s shoulder.

Ismene angles the book shut, and raises her face and then an eyebrow, brief and unimpressed. “You’ve been taking them already.” 

Instead of answering, Harrow turns over the pale wedge of meat on her plate. Perhaps it is fish, perhaps not. It is very pale, and very oily. Ismene returns to her pages and her disinterest. 

“Is it possible for a lyctor to die of starvation?” Harrow asks. “Or dehydration?” There are many awful things about the gap in the library’s resources, but one of the worst is undoubtedly the fact that— at least for a time— if Harrow wants answers, she must ask questions. What is the energy cost, mid-battle, of a broken arm? What about a gut wound? What about a spinal fracture? What about a knife driven directly through the throat? Or into the brain?

There are no deaths on this ship, which is full off serving skeletons and lyctors, all the dead and undying subjects of the Necrolord Prime. Practically, this doesn’t matter. Harrow has more than all the thanergy she needs. She is so often overflowing, humming with power, riding the slaughter in her body. But she feels the absence of death, as she feels the lack of moisture in the air, as her lips chap until blood rises through the paint smeared across them. Presumably, death in her proximity will still matter. She will still be able to reach into it for power.

Ismene tilts her head slightly, a nod which grants consideration, as if this is a very interesting question, and also, perhaps, the first interesting thing Harrow has ever said. Harrow has experienced being feared, hated, and also respected, even treasured. She has no experience being dismissed. “Theoretically,” Ismene says, in an airy tone. Harrow briefly allows the urge to knock out her teeth, which passes when she begins to be useful. “Anything could kill a lyctor. I would say it’s a matter of tipping point more than individual act. As you saw. But the tipping point is very high. So I would say no, unless it was compounded by other injuries or ailments. It would take a very long time, too long for a murder and very inefficient for a suicide.” She rests a hand on her chin with the satisfaction of someone who has just gotten to explain something. “Does that answer your question?”

Several muscles tighten in Harrow’s jaw. “Yes.” 

Ismene lifts a bite of her own meal on her fork, and then remarks, “We could ill afford to lose any more lyctors.” Harrow, no longer interested, eats her own bite of pallid meat. It tastes more than a little like Ianthe’s skin did. 

For a moment, Ismene studies her. The fabric Harrow bound around her eyes on the First is a missed convenience, which assured her that no one would try to read her expression. Her own control of her face, and the paint besides, is perfectly sufficient, but she hates it when people try to make eye contact. 

“What did you think you were trying to do, with Ianthe?” 

Harrow takes another bite. The food on the Ninth may have been bland, but at least it was grown in her soil, and she knew what it was.

Ismene waits out a long silence, and then, with cool and genuine curiosity, asks, “Do you expect someone to worry about you?”

Harrow, stopped mid-bite, blinks at her in brief, genuine surprise. She cannot imagine why she would expect this. “No,” she answers, and swallows, “I don’t.” 

Ismene lets this lie a moment, and then, catching the eye of the lyctor from the Second across the room, lifts her hand in acknowledgement and rises. She spares Harrow a last look, eyes cool and silvery as ship siding, and says simply. “There is no time for your personal dramas this century. Maybe next.” 

Reflexively, Harrow sneers at her. “And yet you waste so much time talking,” she snaps to the retreating back. She wonders how these people stood each other’s company for centuries. Then again, perhaps, that is why there are so few of them left. 

Beside her, there is Ismene’s book, her pen and her sheets of flimsy and the leather pouch she carries these things in. These things left beside Harrow, she thinks, not out of trust or out of oversight, but as one of those small slaps in the face. _Go on, have this, what will it help you? _Nevertheless, Harrow reaches over, she flips through the flimsy, which is blank except for a few brief notes on the book, and the book, which is an account of agriculture on the Fourth a century ago. Harrow scoffs. Ismene, on the other side of the room, has looked away from her, and bent to conversation with Cryus. Her face leaned quite close to his, her hair draped like a curtain over them both. Something they are very intent on, that Harrow will probably never be told. Oh well. Harrow opens the book to a chapter that Ismene has already passed, runs her finger along the place where page meets binding. 

From the pouch at her waist, Harrow takes a dusting of bone dust, and sprinkles it between the pages. She does this twice more in different sections, bent as if reading, and then straightens up and walks away. 

__________________________

Harrowhark turns eighteen on the Emperor’s ship of lyctors, sleepless and strained and aching in her muscles. She does not realize until a few days later, which is not much different than every other year. There would have been a ceremony for this though, on the Ninth, her coming of age. From one duty to another. If the Reverend Lord and Lady had passed away shortly afterwards, this, finally, might have been permissable. 

Instead, Harrow rises from no sleep, prays to God on his own drifting ship for a purpose to serve him in, exercises body and necromancy, and spits herself on the rock of her anger. That anger which says, _How dare you, how dare you, how dare you? _And rises again in the imaginary morning as two hundred and one sons and daughters and a mouth full of salt water. 

Three days later, Harrow is called to serve her Emperor with her sword and her arts, and it is such a relief she could die. She  dresses quickly, robes and veil, replacing bone studs in ears, rings on her fingers, all of these small missiles, her ribcage corselet fastened around her waist. Only one of those ribs had been cracked off, when it was returned to her, bundled with her robes and Gideon’s swords. Harrow’s first act of necromancy after she awoke had been to grow that bone back to perfect wholeness. There is an orderly ceremony to clothing herself in black and bones. Harrow has made the same motions in the same garments since she was a child. Though when she was a child, she wore a child’s bones. It was a very blunt kind of symbol then. Subtlety is not a particular quality of the Ninth. 

Dressed and with her rapier, she climbs into her shuttle. They are going down in two teams onto of the Fifth’s small appendix planets, this one housing as many records and artifacts as it does people, and housing, also now, a number of chitinous, scuttling monsters. Harrow shares her shuttle with Cyrus, unfortunately, which is at least better than sharing it with Ianthe. The lyctor of the Second smiles sympathetically at her as he arms himself, buckles and straps on a sturdy looking armor. “Well,” he says to Harrow, “first time’s always the scariest.” 

Harrow turns to look out her window, at the open throat of the sky. She remembers the Ninth sliding away from her, the realization that the earth of her home itself would be indifferent to her absence. All of it that she could bring with her standing beside her and being as much of a dick as she could, as always. _Do you want my hanky? _

“You’ve been practicing your ass off,” continues Cyrus, because a millennium is evidently not long enough to learn how to recognize disinterest. “Just don’t get too in your own head. Your body knows what to do.” 

Harrow has always felt indifferent to her body, which looked so much less than she was and tended to inconvenience her. Her body doesn’t know shit. It’s a bad euphemism. 

“Having a hard time, huh?” Cyrus huffs, taps the tip of his rapier against the floor of the ship. “That happens to everyone. I’m getting you don’t wanna talk about it.”

After that, Harrow gets a few moments of exquisitely blessed silence. She is not sure she has ever appreciated a stretch of quiet more, not even Griddle's vow of silence was quite this much relief from inanity. Then, a big hand lands on her shoulder. 

“You’re not the first one to feel like this,” Cyrus says, and pats her awkwardly over her robes. “It’ll get better. Anyone can get used to living with anything eventually.”

“Touch me again,” Harrow says, in the sepulchral voice of the keeper and master of the Locked Tomb. “And I will feed you your own stubby fingers and then burst them out through the lining of your stomach.” 

“Oof,” Cyrus says, and chuckles, but, demonstrating some survival instinct, takes his hand away. 

When their shuttle lands, Harrow rises, furious as a saint and humming in every practiced bone of her body with the desire to feel something, anything, death itself, break against her will. And also twenty-one days sleepless, stretching her own cells, luminous with exhaustion and perhaps feeling slightly romantic towards the idea of getting her ass kicked. 

And then, “Let’s give ‘em hell, kiddo,” says Cyrus, and utterly ruins Harrow’s mood, at least for the battle and probably for the rest of the week. 

Harrow snarls at him with teeth showing, riding too much pre-battle adrenaline to think of a better retort, and Cyrus sidles past her, down the shuttle’s ramp and out towards the sounds of violence. Harrow straightens her shoulders, flexes some of the rage out of her muscles, and lets one of her bone carved rings fall into Cyrus’ open bag before she starts after him. 

Harrowhark the First strides out of her shuttle like the first note in a murder ballad, her rapier held at the ready and an opening sensation beneath her fingertips that hints at what power might answer her now when she calls. 

A few hours later, she is carried back to it unconscious, which is, in fact, a surprise to no one but her. 


End file.
